[metafunctor]

That's the point, with a credible currency you don't need to know the people or companies you're trading with. Instead of peers, you trust that the currency used for trading is somewhat stable — so it makes sense to trade using that currency.

With a single company to trade with, or a tiny cryptocurrency, you are trading with a very, very small fraction compared to an established global currency.

I find it amazing that people are not getting this.

[candiodari]

Oh if only this were true. Just so we're clear when you say "established global currency", what you're saying in practice is "SWIFT" (and a few "competitors").

Ok, so one of the problems things like bitcoin solve is that trust in the currency really encompasses trusting quite a few organisations, and these being trustworthy is only true up to a certain transaction size, and only on large averages. Basically, the issue is that banks can't be trusted, and therefore anyone big enough to make double-digit million value transactions can't be trusted (because they might be the bank, own the bank, or simply owe the bank a lot of money, ...). There are also more complex cases where governments get involved and muck things up (financial fraud, bankruptcy cases, tax investigations, ...). And there are other cases (terrorist financing, sanctions, ...).

All of those problems should not be the concern of merchants, but they are in practice, because governments have unilaterally decided that interfering without recourse in payment systems is the way they'll police the world. So they change payment streams (which are between 2 parties, say A and B, and they have some problem with A). Issue is always the same: B buys something from A. One of the parties in the chain, or a government, or the police, or ... has a bill for A, and halts the payment. A then claims (truthfully) non-reception of funds and refuses to deliver. B is left without recourse, without money, and without the good they paid for. Needless to say, nobody accepts responsibility for damaging B. But it gets worse.

So in fact this is one of the big advantages of cryptocurrencies, actually. With dollars (or any such currency), even if they're on your bank account they can disappear months later.

Essentially, large banks, judicial system and governments have the ability to impose their losses on others, in the "traditional" currency systems, and they use that ability too much, without caring who else they damage in the process.

When it comes to "if I have the money, I can trust that I actually have it" cryptocurrencies (all of them) are far superior to SWIFT (essentially all banks are part of SWIFT) in terms of what merchants consider trustworthiness.

There are other advantages that they also have. For instance, despite the complaints, bitcoin is still far faster than SWIFT.

[skewart]

> Basically, the issue is that banks can't be trusted,...

And crypto exchanges, and all the other intermediaries you'll probably end up dealing with in practice, can be trusted?

I get the usefulness of a decentralized permissionless network for peer-to-peer transactions. But Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies today are looking pretty darn far away from that promise.

[candiodari]

Comparatively I still believe they're more trustworthy than the fiat currency ones. But that doesn't really matter in practice :

As long as your assets are in the cryptocurrency itself, and you're happy with that, there is no need to trust any intermediaries at all.

You can have local and international money transfer that safe, final and trustworthy. Money, of course, meaning bitcoin (or ether, or ...). That's a valid usecase.

That's the key.